WBD225 Audio Transcription

Bitcoin is the Answer with Cameron & Tyler Winklevoss

Interview date: Monday 18th May 2020

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Cameron & Tyler Winklevoss from Gemini. I have reviewed the transcription but if you find any mistakes, please feel free to email me. You can listen to the original recording here.

My picture of the twins, like most, was created from the Social Network and their appearances on mainstream news discussing finance, but I wanted to know more about them. This interview is, therefore, the interview I have wanted to hear from them. We discuss The Social Network, Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg, how they discovered Bitcoin, regulations and the role of Wall Street.

“Bitcoin is the answer, it’s the only hedge or vaccine to give you immunity to the disease of money printing.”

— Tyler Winklevoss

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: Tyler, Cameron, how are you both?

Tyler Winklevoss: Good!

Cameron Winklevoss: Good, thanks. How are you doing?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, really good, because it's taken me about a year to get you two on the podcast and I've gone through every route possible!

Tyler Winklevoss: That's it? I thought it was longer.

Peter McCormack: Well, it was two years ago I first wanted it, but about a year ago I met somebody at the BlockFi party, who worked for the Gemini I was like, "Come on!" Then I've been pestering Jane for about six months to hook this up and then Zac at BlockFi and finally I thought, right, we're on lockdown you've probably got some time so here we are. So thank you for coming on. I've got loads I want to talk to you about before we get into the meaty Bitcoin stuff.

I want to find out a bit more about you two, because I only know you through a film and some other stuff, we will do some juicy Bitcoin stuff, but you two have always been a team, right? So you went to college, you're Olympic rowers, as a team and now you run a company together, but are you competitive with each other?

Cameron Winklevoss: We're not really competitive with each other. I think we definitely push each other and I think the mentality has always been like, if somebody achieves something, let's say on the rowing machine, if Tyler had pulled a big score, I'd be like, "Okay, I guess I can do that, maybe I can do a little bit better."

So it's not like a head on a sort of competition that is often destructive or creates tension in a relationship, it's more of like a pushing and a supporting type of relationship and I think a lot of it's driven by a curiosity, like how good can I get? How far can I push myself and having a teammate and someone as sort of like a sounding board in that adventure is really helpful.

Peter McCormack: And does that translate into Gemini?

Cameron Winklevoss: I think 100%, we bring a lot of our background and a lot of our background is athletics into the day to day and how we kind of lead and think about Gemini and a lot of it's driven by this curiosity to explore the new frontier of crypto and today the frontier is crypto, but tomorrow it might be something else. So yeah, I think it's there all the time.

Peter McCormack: And have you got different strengths between you that you both recognize? Because you can't do the same role.

Cameron Winklevoss: Well we definitely don't always agree on everything. We're not sort of ratifying each other and so it isn't this echo chamber of the same point of view. We might end up getting to the same place ultimately, but we might have different sort of views on how to get there and I think that's what makes it pretty exciting. I think that if we were agreeing with each other all the time, then that would probably be problematic and we'd have to think about that, because I think a lot of great ideas and things, there is healthy disagreement on what the right approach might be.

Peter McCormack: Tyler, what do you disagree on?

Tyler Winklevoss: So Cameron's lefty and I'm righty, so I guess technically we use different sides of our brain that are more dominant. We're what you call mirror image twins. So I guess 25% of twins are righty, lefty mirror image and I guess the eggs splits later in the pregnancy process. So that's kind of a fun fact and maybe that's kind of why we come at things slightly differently, but with the same value set and foundation, but different enough to keep things interesting and be a really good team. As rowers I only rowed on starboard, so I sort of leaned out to one side of the boat and Cameron leaned only to the other side of the boat and we were at those sides our whole 15 years of rowing.

So it's pretty cool when you see anybody in a pair, it sort of slits at the front of the boat and then it back together at the finish of the stroke. So yeah, our mirroredness worked very well in sports, but we used to play Legos, as kids, we were teammates all along and as Cameron said his victory is my victory and mine is his and that's kind of, I think, what made us different than other siblings who compete against each other, but in a really negative sort of toxic way. We never felt that way. We felt like we're in this together and that's allowed us to basically be teammates our whole lives for over 38 years.

Peter McCormack: I didn't even know there's there was a mirror twin thing. This is a whole new thing for me.

Tyler Winklevoss: Yeah, it's pretty wild, like when you see us eating across the table, you'd be like, "Oh my gosh!"

Peter McCormack: That's mad. So you're essentially two halves of the same... So does that mean one of you is more creative and one of you is more, I don't know, a more kind of like maths type person?

Cameron Winklevoss: So I think that a lot of times people try to make it like, is one more creative than the other? I think in reality we're equally creative. It's just, I go about it in a different way than Tyler does. So back in high school, when we were studying for an exam, I would sort of probably go straight to studying, maybe have my papers a little more scattered all over the floor and just kind of get right into it and Tyler would spend a lot of time organizing and making perfect notes, but he might not spend as much time actually studying them and we ended up getting about the same grades.

It was just a different approach, you know? So I think that the way Tyler creates is different than mine, but I wouldn't say that I'm more or less creative than him and working together we can really amplify the outcome significantly more than if I was working in a vacuum and you sort of see that, especially in technology, there's always great duos throughout the past 30, 40 years, you've got Gates and Allen, Jobs and Woz and the list goes on and on. It's never really this one singular person. That's a myth and often perpetuated by things like Hollywood, because it sort of makes for a simplistic, easy to digest story, but it's never that simple, it's way more nuanced and complex. In the case of us, it's just so obvious because there's literally two of us and we look the same!

Peter McCormack: Well did Hollywood do that to you guys? Did it oversimplify everything?

Tyler Winklevoss: I think it has to, right? You've got a two, maybe three hour time attention span to write a movie or to tell a story. So it cannot be so rooted in factual stuff, then you'd have a 40 hour documentary and a lot of people won't show up to see that. So there to be some creative license to capture the spirit of something, but not necessarily the reality, but be inspired by it. So yeah, I think that's the medium of a movie and you have to take that approach to it. You can't expect it to be more than it is.

Peter McCormack: So when that film happened, I know you've probably talked about it a bunch of times, but people want to hear about this stuff, but do you get consulted on it or does it just happen?

Cameron Winklevoss: It just happened. There was enough in the public domain because there was litigation as you know, so a lot of... Not all the documents were public, but enough of it. So I think all of us met the standard of public people, so the film producers and screenwriters could create that story.

So yeah, it just kind of happened, we were not involved and it really happened... To sort of get technical on it, is Zuckerberg's roommate pitched the story, Eduardo Saverin, he had a falling out with Mark and he pitched the story to Ben Mezrich who wrote 21 that became Bringing Down the House and he wrote another book that became a movie, it escapes me at this moment, Ben wrote the book, only a treatment got leaked to the internet and then Scott Rudin, the producer and Aaron Sorkin jumped on it and were like, "We love this story, it's Shakespearian betrayal! It's all of these amazing elements."

So I think that's before they even understood the rift between us and Mark, it was just between his roommate and that falling out later down the road in Facebook history, they jumped on it. They're the kind of folks that have enough track record and influenced in Hollywood to get anything pretty much green lit and so they made it happen and all of a sudden, I think it was something like 18 months later, the movie was finished and it was out in theatres. I think it even surprised them how well it did because we got to meet Aaron and Scott and all the creators even the actors at the end of the filming and I don't think they realized...

I think they knew they were onto something and this was the fall of 2010. They did a screening and it was a really big hit with this study group or control group, but then when it went to theatres, it really just beat all of their wildest expectations and dreams of what it could do and it was the front runner for Best Picture in the award season up until the final moment when Harvey Weinstein did his magic, I think you even call it magic and got The King's Speech to win that vote. It's a very political game.

There's 6,000 people who vote on who's the best picture and if you're good at influencing them, wining and dining or whatever, and you get them to vote your way, then you win and there wasn't really a campaign for The Social Network because I don't think they expected it to be up there. So they didn't quite have the machine behind it, the way that The Weinstein Company did at that time.

Tyler Winklevoss: Well, the tell is also that the premier was in September at the New York Film Festival, which is a very prestigious and great festival, but if you believe that you have a Best Picture, it's very hard to keep that in the public consciousness for, I don't know, however many months from September until February. So what you end up doing is you try to release really closer to November, December and have that meteoric rise peak perfectly during the award season. So that's kind of the tell that they didn't realize that how popular it would be, but also how critically acclaimed the film might be.

Peter McCormack: I loved it and I'm not just saying that because you're here, but I genuinely loved it and I think one of the things that helped me was I'm a big Fincher fan, almost everything he does is amazing. Even Alien 3, which got panned, I thought it was brilliant. I thought it was a really unique part of the story, so I really liked it. I thought they did a really, really good job, but I think what I'm trying to get at is, I guess when I saw it, I saw it cold, like you would have seen it for the first time, but the film isn't about me, I'm not in it. So what is it like? It's that one dude who played you both, but what is it like watching a story being told about part of your life and you've had no control over it?

Cameron Winklevoss: I would say the word surreal probably best describes it. I guess it's hard to quite explain. I guess you kind of are removed a little bit, you're watching in a way, characters on a screen that are sort of not you, but supposed to be you. I'm not sure other than surreal, probably how best to describe it.

Tyler Winklevoss: I mean the older I get and I see clips of it, the more I can sort of appreciate it objectively as art and be like, "Oh, that's interesting, I get it." But when I first saw it in 2010, it was like, "That's definitely not me!" I saw all the places where it wasn't me and how it was so wrong, but I loved the movie and I was able to separate and compartmentalize the difference between this is a great story, it's a great movie, that doesn't mean it's me. I've never not felt that way, but the older I get, the more I can sort of appreciate it objectively, like maybe how you can more of like a stranger coming to it and just enjoying it.

Peter McCormack: Do you remember where did you watch it for the first time? Was it a premiere or just the two of you in an apartment somewhere?

Cameron Winklevoss: I think we did at least one screening pre-seeing it at the premiere, and then we saw it at the New York Film Festival.

Tyler Winklevoss: I think we saw it at Sony's headquarters? We got a previewing.

Cameron Winklevoss: Yeah and I think another thing to point out is that the goal of the filmmakers was to sort of tell three points of view or three sides of a story. It was not to draw a conclusion and you can credibly sort of argue each side of it and the goal really is that when people leave the theatre, that's when the conversation starts and it's supposed to be polarizing on that level.

So it's really interesting to see people take different sides and some people think that it sort of is supposed to be this definitive thing and it's really art and it's trying to create a conversation and one of the producers, Scott Rudin, he said, "Look, if I was going to tell the story, I could do it in 12 minutes, but it's not about telling a start, finish and a conclusion, it's about that conversation."

Tyler Winklevoss: It's very much like Rashomon, if you've seen that by Akira Kurosawa, and it's the subjectivity of truth, different people interpret this crime scene differently and the truth is sort of somewhere in the middle. So you can take Mark's position, you can take our position, you can take Eduardo's position and people really identify with A, B and C, depending on their own experience and sometimes it cuts down to how you felt in high school.

Did you identify with the jocks, with the nerds, with the nerds that are falling out? The truth is all of us are nerds, we were nerds in high school, we were too busy rowing and studying to be the cool jock kids, but that wasn't our character in the movie. So really you take the side, it's so brilliant because you take the side with whoever you identify with and like Cameron said, it's inconclusive, there's great arguments on both sides.

Tyler Winklevoss: It's like, if you invented Facebook, you would invented Facebook and then Eduardo has some rhetorical, like something like... "Obviously we did something wrong, we must've done something wrong, they sent us a cease and desist letter" and there's ammunition for everybody. It was like Cameron said, the conversation begins when you leave the theatre and you can just see groups of friends going and having some amazing arguments and heated debates of who's right, who's wrong, who owns the idea and this and that and the initial case wasn't even about IT.

That was like one of 10 claims, but it was really a fraud claim that was the major thrust of it and breach of contract, but forget breach of contract, fraud doesn't require a contract, it just requires someone to knowingly make misrepresentations to you that you rely on to your detriment. We have that with the emails, just look at the public documents! So the movies sort of talks about the idea and the IT, but address the legal case, that was a claim we could have not put in or put in, it was a footnote to the actual thing.

So just brilliant job on the filmmakers to tell that story in a way that really shaped the generation, how they thought and the thing I'm most proud about it is how it inspired a generation of founders and future entrepreneurs. I sort of think about this, and it's not my work, so I hope this doesn't sound arrogant, but I don't think it does because I didn't create the movie. But what Top Gun did to Navy aviation and the idea of people wanting to be a Top Gun pilot, I think The Social Network did for start-ups and entrepreneurship.

Peter McCormack: Yeah I completely agree. Like I said, I love the film and my son loves the film. He's actually downstairs and I told him, I'm doing this interview. He's like, "What?!" But he loved the film. My dad loved the film and that was one of the great things is anyone could enjoy that film, I think it was great. Listen, look without getting into the details, we don't need to do that today, but would you say it was a fairly accurate representation of the situation?

Cameron Winklevoss: I think that it captured a moment in time for sure. The zeitgeists of that period of time, it's I think maybe one of the first sort of modern films about the 2000s that captures that well. There's a lot of things that aren't in the film that would lead you to a different conclusion, but I think there's a lot of accuracy in the film and I think to what we were sort of talking about earlier, we view it as sort of great art.

Tyler Winklevoss: It's a starting point. If you really want to understand what happened, you'd have to go to the documents, court filings the public records and it's not a conclusive thing as you're imagining. You're not going to watch that movie and like have a fully formed opinion of what happened, but it captures a spirit that gets very zeitgeisty. It's almost like it feels like there's an element of The Breakfast Club, you know about it? How that captured the eighties.

Was it the John Hughes movies that really captured what it was like to go to high school and grow up in the eighties? I mean these captured college campuses in the arts, so, but it's a great starting point. If you really want to know what happened or get really technical, you have to go so much deeper because it's just the beginning.

Peter McCormack: I'll tell you another interesting thing, I think time changes how you reflect on it as well and I think I've seen it around four times and when I, apologies for this, but when I first watched it, I think I was team Zuck, and I was like, "Fuck those guys, those jocks", because you're big and Olympic rowers and I'm not! Now I saw it again a couple of years ago and I reflect on it and I'm now like, "Oh fuck Mark, I'm team Winklevoss" and I'll tell you a funny thing, Cameron, you don't know my show, but you did once like a tweet of mine and I put out the tweet once, I think it was something like this, "I can't wait for The Social Network 2, Bitcoin's going to be at $100,000 and the Winklevoss are going to have their revenge on Zuck!"

Then you gave me a little like, that was the only time. But I think time you reflect on it differently over time because you see what Facebook has become and it isn't great in a lot of ways. You can also look at some of the stuff you've done and I think the reality of what the people in it who've been represented in a film have actually done in life, allow you to look at the film in a different way. Is that fair?

Tyler Winklevoss: Yeah, my only gripe with the film and I understand why they did this, is our characters don't come off as entrepreneurs. They come off as people of high integrity, great character, athletic, polite, all these cool qualities, but there's this total gap of who we are like the creativity, curiosity, entrepreneurial, it's sort of omitted. So we're sort of painted in these broad brush strokes and then it's the geeks, the geniuses, the jocks and I think we're a little bit more than that. At least the two of us, we just have more ranges of who we are as people and we've shown that over time.

I think by building Gemini, by founding a company, by being in tech, rowing was always kind of a detour, which started in high school as we started the rowing team. Our next door neighbours said, "Hey, let's try this sport" and one thing led to another, good at it, get into college, good at it there, let's give it a shot. Zuckerberg, the thing with Facebook happened, so okay, let's keep rowing, make the Olympics, oh we're 30, 15 years hell that went quick! But we always loved technology, entrepreneurship and our dad is an entrepreneur. We grew up hanging out in his office, we grew up in a start-up we like to say, and we kind of like... We created the rowing team at our high school.

It was like our first start-up, but was also a detour from who we are and what our passions were. So getting back into entrepreneurship, we've done that the last almost 10 years and I think people see that side of us that they didn't see in the movie. Then on the other side of the equation, I think that Facebook and Zuckerberg, that pattern just keeps repeating. So all of the, "Great, who are these guys, we don't really know anybody. Everyone's so young, you're saying this, they're saying that, who do we believe?" The movie sort of gives everyone a point of view, but then the actions and the behaviours continue and sort of the truth comes out. So yeah, I think that's true.

Cameron Winklevoss: Maybe the simple way to put it is that if you asked me at 13 or if you told me a 13, "Hey, you're going to be running a technology company as an adult", I'd be like, "Yeah, that makes a lot of sense", it's exactly where I sort of see myself. If you say to me that you're an Olympian, I'll be like, "Huh, how did that work?!" Because rowing wasn't even on our radar at that point, but we grew up around technology and we were really obsessed, got online really early, started building web pages on the side for fun, making some bucks here and there, we were just really into it.

Our dad's an entrepreneur, he has a software company and so we grew up walking around his office and talking to the engineers and looking at the cool new computers and equipment. I remember getting Windows 95 and getting home from school and being so excited to install it. So that was really a big part of our childhood and I think that didn't really come off, as to Tyler's point and I think people probably see more of that today. There's also this idea that it can't be a group of entrepreneurs.

There's one founder entrepreneur and everybody else is either athletes or something else. But then you look at the PayPal mafia and you have 4 or 5 or 6 people who have started multiple global technology companies over and over again. But that's a harder story to tell.

Peter McCormack: All right, listen, I've asked you enough about that. Only one more thing in there, actually. Did you ever make up with Zuck? Because you potentially, with Libra crossing over, and there was some talk about... I can't remember, I'm just going off memory, would you guys list Libra or something along those lines? Did you ever talk to him again, or is that just all gone?

Cameron Winklevoss: The last time we spoke with him is... To capture it, it's the first chapter of Bitcoin Billionaires, at the settlement. So Bitcoin Billionaires is the book that Ben Mezrich wrote. Ben obviously wrote Accidental Billionaires, which became The Social Network. So Bitcoin Billionaires is almost the sequel, or picking up where it left off, but that first chapter captures the meeting and discussion we had with Mark.

But that was the last time we spoke with him and there's a lot of questions around Libra when it came out or was announced about a year ago. Look, we're excited about the project and we think it's great that a company of Facebook's stature is looking at crypto. I think it's still unclear how, in the direction of crypto or will it be more centralized? But it is the beginning of probably many large companies entering the space and so yeah, we're pretty positive on that kind of development.

Tyler Winklevoss: Yeah, we haven't talked with Mark since, I think the settlement discussions in 2008. But our differences are... That chapter's closed, and we separate that from the merit of something like Libra or what's good for Gemini. We're not about to be personal or let that bleed over into what's the right thing to do for our company, what's the right thing to do for crypto.

So we try and dispassionately, objectively look at Libra, and we're open to it. It's fantastic that a company of Facebook's stature has even uttered the word cryptocurrency, whether or not Libra is actually, like Cameron said, an open cryptocurrency that's on an open network or something more closed, we'll see. But it's certainly got the conversation going and was very positive for the market.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's interesting, I could see this totally wrong, but I could imagine sometime after the settlement, Facebook's growing, you're looking and going, "Fuck, now look at that." Now move on a few years later and you've built this huge successful business, you're in Bitcoin, which is a whole lot more interesting, and in some ways antithetical to what Facebook is doing, which is a massive invasion of privacy sometimes and I guess you've reflected on it at different times, but now you wouldn't change anything, right?

Tyler Winklevoss: So one interesting fact is, we settled, but we actually settled and we took the majority of it in stock, at a $15 billion valuation. That was something in the mediation that myself and Cameron pushed for. Our team of lawyers were like, "Take the cash, you're crazy." We're like, "No, you're crazy. We want going to go back to the beginning where we started as entrepreneurs with some skin in the game." So we pushed back and took the majority of the $65 million in stock at a $15 billion company valuation.

So when Facebook was doing well, we were tied to it. But to answer your question more directly, there's nothing I'd rather be working on and doing right now than crypto. It's amazing what Facebook's accomplished, but when I log into the Internet, I don't log into Facebook. That place feels dead. It doesn't feel where the action's happening, it doesn't seem like an exciting problem to work on. But the future of money, the frontier of crypto, where that's going probably feels like what social media felt like, back in the early 2000s, but it's more meaningful.

Sharing pictures or connecting with people, which was great, a lot of good can come of that. You can share money, you can pay people, you can economically include people, so I think the promise is much greater, and money is the greatest social network of all, Bitcoin being the first. I think it's more meaningful and impactful to the world than social networking. So I would never trade the problem I'm working on right now for that previous problem and as you're seeing, Facebook's getting into crypto because they're kind of bored with their franchise. It's amazing!

Peter McCormack: It's just dying, man. It's boring, the novelty has worn off.

Tyler Winklevoss: Okay, but you make enough money, that gets boring too. As humans, we... I think it's called hedonic adaptation, a billion dollars, as okay, it gets boring. Elon Musk isn't stopping working and Zuckerberg's not stopping working despite the fact that they're worth so much money. It's all about what they're curious about and passionate and the problem they're working on. So that's really what's important.

Cameron Winklevoss: Yeah, there's nothing more depressing in technology than hanging onto an old franchise and clinging on for life. I think Microsoft had that phase where it really felt it just had jumped the shark and it's pretty miraculous the turnaround that's been led, and it's now innovating a lot of its competitors, but Web 2.0, that ship has sailed. It's done and we're now looking at Web 3, and it's literally the future and that's really the exciting part.

Look, I'm sure there's a lot of people in the PayPal mafia who... Maybe if they'd sold eBay or held out a little bit longer, would have made a little bit more, but if you expect to be a founder, an entrepreneur, an investor over the long haul, 20, 30 years, that's just the beginning. So that's how we look at it. We want to be doing this for the next multiple decades and so why get too concerned about one outcome versus the next if you're in it for the long game?

Peter McCormack: So your Facebook stock, that was a seed investment then in some ways?

Cameron Winklevoss: I guess in some ways.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, "Go and build that company and we'll do something else."

Cameron Winklevoss: Yeah, thank you Mark!

Peter McCormack: Cheers Mark! All right, listen, look, the other story, I know this story, but I know a lot of people want it. Can you tell the Ibiza story? Because I think it's fascinating.

Cameron Winklevoss: Sure!

Tyler Winklevoss: Oh, one more thing before we leave that last chapter. Our position was never that, "Hey, we deserve everything about Facebook", it was, "We deserve more than zero."

Peter McCormack: Yeah, "You stole our fucking idea!" Like, "Here's an idea. Can you go and build it? You stole it!" I get it, it's cool, I'm with you on that. But I don't think you have to defend that, I think most people get that, right?

Tyler Winklevoss: Yeah, at the time a lot of people were like... I don't know, it seemed half the people got it and half the people didn't. But Facebook had a huge crisis PR firm turning op-eds against us.

Peter McCormack: Of course.

Cameron Winklevoss: I think people also focused a ton on just the technology and the computer code, and people didn't really realize how big tech was going to get and we're seeing that with the pandemic right now, it's decimating small business and the middle class, and all of that is accruing to big tech. So it's so important to understand the mission of these companies. Are they mission oriented? What are the values? And how are they dealing with that thing?

Tyler Winklevoss: And they're totally happy with the lockdown. They don't have a problem with the lockdown because it's not hurting them and it might even end up benefiting them.

Peter McCormack: Of course!

Tyler Winklevoss: So if you're YouTube and someone's putting up discourse or contradicting the lockdown as maybe the right solution, censor it right? Misinformation, it only helps us. So it's really perverse.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I want to cover that as well actually, because I think that itself is an interesting area to cover, but I do want to do the Ibiza thing.

Tyler Winklevoss: We've got to go back to Ibiza, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, because it's such a cool story!

Cameron Winklevoss: So we went out there in August 2012. We had just retired from rowing, we were trying to figure out what the next step for us was. We had just set up Winklevoss Capital, which is our family office that focuses on backing start-ups, founders, it's effectively a venture fund, except for we're the sole LP. We provide all the capital, which gives us a lot of flexibility in terms of what we can invest in. It also allows us to move quickly and we don't have to deal with explaining a lot of things to other LPs and saying, "Oh, this is why we're investing in this really weird new form of money that the news will tell you that's only being used for illicit activity."

So we had just set up Winklevoss Capital and our idea was, "Look, we know we want to start something again, but we're not sure what that is right now, so why don't we just start investing, meet lots of entrepreneurs, build out our network, and learn? And learn through investing." So as we were doing that, we went out to Ibiza to take a break and this guy...

Peter McCormack: How great is Ibiza, though?

Cameron Winklevoss: It's pretty amazing! The Mediterranean, honestly, in July, August, it's hard to beat. Such a wonderful part of the world. So we went out there and a guy recognized us from The Social Network, and we started talking and he's like, "Have you guys heard about, or have you thought about virtual currency or Bitcoin?" I was like, "No, tell me more" and it sounded a bit weird and foreign at first, but after a shot of tequila it started to really make sense. Then we connected on Twitter and I said, "Hey DM me" and when we got back stateside he sent over some links, some literature, and we started diving pretty deep into it.

I think at one point I remember turning to Tyler and saying, "This is either complete bullshit or the next big thing" and it was super exciting once we understood what it could be. I'm not sure we could have even at that moment totally articulated it, because it's hard to capture Bitcoin in one... There's so many layers to it, but it felt this underdog thing that could potentially challenge almost everything, starting with the financial system and I think what really struck us and resonated was this idea that it provided greater choice, independence, and opportunity, like a new system.

I think a lot of early Bitcoiners perhaps focus on destroying the old system and for us it's more about creating a new system with new opportunities and it goes back, when we think back to our origin story and our background, when we got into rowing in high school there was no rowing team and there was no rowing in our town. As Tyler mentioned, our next-door neighbour had gone away to school and rowed, and so we said, "Let's give this a shot," except for there was no actual options in our town and everybody did the traditional sports. So we ended up finding a rowing club 30 minutes away, it was an old wooden train station that had been moved and basically thrown on an empty lot.

There was no running water, no electricity, no power and our locker room was the gas station on the corner. We commuted up there for an hour each way pretty much throughout the week, doing homework in the car and rowing and after the first year we went to the headmaster and we said, "Hey, we'd like to start a rowing team" and it wasn't about destroying the football team or destroying the basketball team, it was about creating this other option for people to row. Fast forward 20 years later, every single high school in the area in Connecticut where we grew up, in Fairfield County, has a girls and boys rowing team. It's created hundreds, if not more opportunities for people to play a sport.

In fact, a lot of the high schools literally don't have enough teams or sports teams for people to participate. So a lot of kids, they get done with school at 2:00, 2:30, and they go home. Some kids that might be put to good use and some kids might be playing a lot of Fortnite and others might be getting into trouble and it's created all this new opportunity, and it's all about complementing the other sports. So that's how we view crypto and Bitcoin I think. We started doing Bitcoin as this alternative, and I think that's our framework.

Peter McCormack: But you didn't just think, "All right, let's go and build an exchange or something." You had the conviction to go and start buying up as much Bitcoin as you could, right?

Cameron Winklevoss: Yeah, so I think that... We joke, so many people thought their way out of Bitcoin early on and one of the things that probably helped us ...

Tyler Winklevoss: Did you say fought or thought? It almost sounded like fought.

Cameron Winklevoss: Thought, as in think, thought your way out of something. We didn't spend 10 years on a trading desk in finance, we didn't come with these preconceived notions or assumptions or ideas, we really came at it with a beginner's mind and that is one of Gemini's actual core values. That's really how we think about the world and how we build products and build our platform, is with the beginner's mind. We understand that there's elements of the Gemini exchange and our custodial infrastructure that will mimic or rhyme existing capital markets and electronic markets, but we also know that this time it's going to be different in some way.

You really have to take a first principles approach and I think that's what Silicon Valley, often they're talking about the similar thing with that terminology, and our terminology is beginner's mind. We were beginners, we entered this space and we were really ... It was more about, "How does this work? How can we get this to work?" Than, "How can we kill this idea?" Or "This doesn't fit into the framework that I spent 20 years becoming a master of and perfecting so I am so emotionally tied to the 20 or 30 years I put into finance over here that I cannot let go of that and accept that this is the future."

We see that over and over and over again over the last decade or whatever and we didn't have that. So that was really interesting! So we found it and we didn't just dip our toe into it, we basically jumped headfirst or did a cannonball into the pool of crypto and started buying through brokers online. There's a lot of OTC brokers back in those days, some of them are probably no longer in the market any more, they've been replaced by bigger brokers and bigger OTC desks that we read about a lot today and then also Mt. Gox. We bought a lot of Bitcoin on Mt. Gox, thankfully did not get caught up, always pulled it off exchange and wasn't injured in that collapse.

We also bought some on Bitstamp, especially when Silk Road was busted, because the Bitcoin price tanked because a lot of people were like, "Oh well, there's 90% of the use cases of this thing" and we're like, "No, look at the blockchain, look at where these things are going. This is digital gold!" The media has totally skewed the narrative. It's all about anonymity, illicit transactions, drugs, assassinations and we knew on the ground in what we're doing and the people we were talking to that that wasn't the case, it wasn't the reality.

What was the case is that the smartest people in the room were obsessed about Bitcoin and the cryptographers, the cypherpunks, and the protocol builders and developers, the people who were really not at the commercialized form of Web 2.0, the Valley, they were the people that were interested. But they'd spent two decades or more thinking about these problems and fighting for online privacy. Talk to a guy like Zooko Wilcox, the Zcash project, he's been thinking about these things for decades! Satoshi was likely in that group, he, she, they, whoever it was and when the white paper was published in 2009, it's the culmination of decades of work leading up to that.

I think Satoshi might have said they stood on the shoulder of giants, like you've got guys like David Chaum who built the building blocks. So it's really interesting to see how relevant, but for a long period of time in technology, the people who are now at the forefront of crypto and Bitcoin were really not at the forefront, because the whole world...

Tyler Winklevoss: They weren't even back office. They were basement, unemployed probably, in a basement or some sort of lab and now they're the rock stars, which is kind of cool to see.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, this is the bit I want to dig in with you guys, because this is where I can't figure out. So massively successful "crypto needs rules" campaigns and I at the time didn't like it because I'm from the Silk Road, that's how I discovered it. I discovered Bitcoin through the Silk Road. I don't any more, but I was doing a lot of drugs back then and what an amazing website. I loved the censorship resistance and it was cool for me because I wanted to get... My mom got sick with cancer and we wanted to get her cannabis oil.

So because of the Silk Road I knew how to get it because in the UK you can't buy that shit. So there is this whole liberty side, freedom, blah, blah, blah and when I was doing my research for this, I knew about "crypto needs rules," I knew about that side of things, which a lot of people have challenged you on and I think also you did a really good show with Laura Shin about, actually. But then also I see you tweeting about censorship of YouTube and I've got one of the tweets here, this is you Cameron, "By investing in Bitcoin you are facilitating a peaceful transfer of power from government to the people."

So I have this spectrum of fully regulated product to censorship resistant tool for freedom and liberty and I always thought you guys were just on this regulated side, but I can't seem to pin you. It's almost like you're the full spectrum and some people aren't. Some people are just regulated product, some people are just "Censorship resistant, fuck the government, let's take them down." It seems you span the whole spectrum?

Cameron Winklevoss: Yeah, I think in a lot of ways it's not a zero sum, or it doesn't have to be a binary viewpoint. It can be more nuanced. If crypto is going to go mainstream, then we have to have some level of thoughtful regulation. As Gemini, we have to know our customers, but we can also create a very easy way for people to get into the system. But nobody has to stay on Gemini. If you decide you don't want to store your gold in a vault, you can build your own safe in your home and store your gold in that safe.

The digital equivalent would be, let's say, a Ledger Nano or whatever. You can self-custody crypto, but for most people, there's a spectrum. The vast majority of people want to own gold through an ETF, they don't want to actually have physical gold, they just want exposure to the investment. But there is that option where you can go it alone and that is incredibly true for crypto, because it's digital and the physical overhead of going it alone doesn't exist and the independence and sovereignty around crypto is unmatched with any technology before.

But you have to have an element of thoughtful regulation, and you cannot point to any thriving market in the world that doesn't have some rules based system that tries to foster positive outcomes. Free-for-alls don't work, it just won't. But at the same time, overregulating something will absolutely stifle it. So I do think there's a nuanced spectrum and it doesn't have to be an either/or, an all or nothing situation.

Tyler Winklevoss: I think it's a really good point. So you can be pro-regulation but disagree with the state or regulation. So you're talking about cannabis. You can be pro... Before, right? You mentioned your experience with cannabis.

Peter McCormack: No, it wasn't cannabis.

Tyler Winklevoss: Okay. Well, let's just say cannabis, you can be pro regulation and the regulation could be, cannabis is legal, and you can say, "That's ridiculous, it should be regulatorily legal to go to a dispensary to be able to get it for medical or recreational use in moderation." So you want to change the regulation to make sense and a more regulated cannabis market is better for consumers, it's better for everyone and it's better for the government.

So I think that it's not binary necessarily. I think we take a case by case basis and we think that we can change or shape the regulation to make sense, as opposed to, "Oh, the regulation doesn't make sense. Regulation is bad." No, it's probably a good thing, let's just make it make sense.

Cameron Winklevoss: So let me give another example. In the late '90s, early 2000s, people started to realize that the recording industry was taking advantage of the customer. You pay $20 for a CD and back then $20 was a lot of money. You get a CD and you get an album and maybe you really only want one or two songs there and people were like, "We're just done with this." So you have Napster, which was the first mainstream version of file pirating. Napster, of course, was too centralized and ended up getting shut down. We all know how that ended and that spawned a more decentralized versions like Kazaa or whatever the services were.

It was dangerous because there's tons of malware, you could get an infected file and so there was risk involved and of course there was a risk of prosecution. Some college students and people did get prosecuted for piracy, that was one of the initial strategies of the recording industry is, "We're just going to sue our way out of this problem", as opposed to, "Wait, the current system is broken. We probably need to rethink how we price and offer this to our customers."

So Napster was this protest effectively against what was going on and there's a couple more protests that got harder and harder to stop, until finally, someone from the outside, in this case, Silicon Valley, Jobs and iTunes came along and said, "We're going to create a better delivery system for you and we're going to price this in a reasonable way at $1 a song." Everybody said, "You know what? I'm okay paying $1 for a song. I believe in the artist, I want to support the artist, this feels fair. I'm not getting totally screwed or raked over the coals here. The piracy thing, I don't feel good about that spiritually and it's not a safe or better experience." iTunes was just a better, better experience. But the recording industry was unable to really see that they needed to do that.

So it doesn't have to be like, "Well, this system and then totally screw the system. We're going to go over here and pirate and steal stuff." There is a middle ground. People talk about regulation a lot and they bitch and moan and say this or that. Well, we're regulated. Part of our regulation and obligation, we have to protect your privacy. We can't mine your data and then go sell it, we can't do a lot of the things. Yet when you look at all big tech that is unregulated, they are mining the shit out of your data all day long, and people are complaining about it because there's no regulation. They're not breaking any laws, they're allowed to legally do what they're doing.

They can follow you around the internet, they're corporate peeping toms, they see everything you do and so that's an obvious outcome where there's no regulation and there's no rules and literally, everybody's pissed off. I don't think anybody supports what's happened to our privacy and how we've literally given it away before our own eyes and so I just think it's like how you frame and think about it and the government and these bodies, they're always going to have some regulatory footprint. They're not going to let things go, just willy nilly and so let's engage and find that great middle ground where everybody's happy. So that's how we've been thinking about it.

Peter McCormack: Yeah and some of it I get, I'm not like one of these radical anarcho-capitalists, I like some of the libertarian stuff. I think some there's merit in a lot of the free market ideas, but the one area I get a bit bothered about is financial privacy, the ability to censor transactions or block transactions and I'll tell you why it bothers me. On a personal level, you guys won't know this, but I mentioned earlier, so when my mum got sick, I used one of these dark web marketplaces to buy cannabis oil as a treatment because it's illegal here.

I was cool, because I thought Bitcoin was private at the time and now I wouldn't do that because then I realized it isn't. So there's a chance that maybe I would use something like a mixer to hide my Bitcoin, so I could go and make that transaction. But in doing so that actually I get blocked out I can get blocked out of some sections of the Bitcoin economy. I could try and custody with you guys and maybe get rejected. BlockFi, one of my sponsors, I can maybe try and earn interest with them and again, I could get blocked.

So the financial privacy is the one area where it gets to me a little bit and I know it's difficult because if you don't play by the government regulations, they're just not going to allow your business to operate. It's not like you have a choice to go fuck the government, you can't just do that. But I'd be interested to know what your perspectives are on financial privacy.

Cameron Winklevoss: So I feel very strongly about financial privacy and I think one of the misconceptions about Bitcoin, at least early on, was this narrative that it's anonymous or totally anonymous.

Tyler Winklevoss: That's the US dollar!

Cameron Winklevoss: Yeah, cash is King when it comes to anonymity. I think that, don't take it from us, from what I'm saying, but look at what we've done. The third coin we added to our platform was Zcash and when we added it, a lot of people said, "How did you manage to do that? You're a New York trust company you're regulated by DFS." We're like, "Well we engaged with them. We went down and we educated them and we talked to them about the benefits of commercial privacy and how when you send a wire, the only people that know that transaction occurred is the sending bank and the receiving bank."

The whole world doesn't see that, but they do with Bitcoin. Zcash was obviously, as most people know, is a fork of Bitcoin that is focused on privacy and creating commercial privacy and restoring the things that we have in the existing system in many ways. So by engaging, we got them comfortable with this idea and we drew parallels to this idea that the existing banking system is comfortable with cash, ATMs and all that stuff.

You don't necessarily know what happens to the cash when it leaves the system, but you do have visibility into the entry and exit points, so to speak and that's an example where we were able to get regulators comfortable with a privacy coin. We chose that project in part because of the team, we know Zooko, and we believe in the technology and the mission oriented aspect of their project, but also the importance of privacy. If crypto is not private and totally open, then it's not really going to achieve a lot of the things we think it can.

Tyler Winklevoss: And we understand how open Bitcoin is because we have blockchain forensic tools as a company to look at the blockchain. But if you go to your doctor and you run a credit card or whatnot, nobody knows that. But in certain countries you might go to a certain doctor for a certain procedure or you have to do on the black market, because what you're doing is illegal, you'll get killed or stoned for it. and you spend Bitcoin, potentially you could be discovered for that. So human rights, all these things come into challenge can be questions without the right level of privacy.

So people think of privacy and anonymity is only one extreme or the end of the continuum of elicit bad stuff, terrorists, whatever. But there's so much stuff in between that's super legitimate. It is legal in one country and should be in another, but it's not and the cornerstone of human rights and dignity is your ability to reveal yourself when you want to and when you're ready if you want to at all, certain things. We have fairly good laws in the US that protect that, but our money should mimic that privacy as well and I think that's pretty fundamental to the society I want to live and the world I want to live in.

So there's huge philosophical merit to coins like Zcash. The team's great, they're real, they went to the DFS as well, talked to them, so it was a joint effort. But yeah, I think there's so much there that people don't understand and of course, unfortunately headlines in the world we live in, 140 characters, it's like Silk Road dark market, it's just big brush strokes for everything, but there's so much in between that's different. So yeah, that's how we view this.

Peter McCormack: So I guess you therefore support the idea of bringing better privacy to Bitcoin and allowing people to have private transactions away from the eyes of the government?

Tyler Winklevoss: Yeah, I think that privacy is super important. Currency and money had been used by governments to manipulate and control populations for as long as the invention of money. Some governments are better than others, but yeah, capital controls, inability to get money in and out, remittances, it's just another tool, right? And I think it should be limited. I think we should... The other thing about our message to regulators was like, "This is going to happen with or without you. It's happening and the people who create these projects, when you say no, they come back stronger." They're not like, "Oh yeah, yeah we won't do this anymore." "So it's either work with them or against, but it's going to happen nonetheless.

So it's better to work with us, work with companies like Gemini have a window into this new technology, than be completely shut out." So I think that's another important thing, the inevitability of Bitcoin to shut it down is to shut down the internet, is to become North Korea and so I don't think the US or any other government wants to become that and to do that as far as the last time I checked. So you've got to work with this, you can't stop it! That's the whole thing about decentralization. So how are you going to engage with it? Companies like Gemini are good points to do that, but this is happening. So educate yourselves, figure out the way to regulate it in a thoughtful way!

Peter McCormack: Well this is why I think it's interesting to have a good, proper chat to the two of you, because externally, you can see you two doing the work, doing your interviews, in your suits, "crypto needs rules" and I think that actually perhaps is a bit of a misrepresentation of your real ideology of your Bitcoin thesis and where you see this going, because you do actually recognize the ills of government. You do recognize the ills of money printing, what the Fed is doing, censorship, you do seem to recognize that.

Tyler Winklevoss: 100%!

Peter McCormack: And it's almost like you're recognizing that to get Bitcoin to where you think it needs to be you have to play within the system to begin with.

Cameron Winklevoss: Yeah, you can look...

Peter McCormack: And then we burn it all fucking down!

Tyler Winklevoss: Joker the world! You can go outside and spend your time with picketing a company or you can start a company or you can become a part of that company, rise to the top and change it from the top down, culturally, and manage, whatever or you can go start your own company. There's many ways to volunteer time to change the world.

So we started a company, but we're engaging with the government and the policy we want to change or shape for a thoughtful future and that's our approach. Someone else's approach would be like, "Screw this, I'm going to a different zip code or I'm going off shore, I'm going to do this differently" and that's the role they play. But we're playing our role, it's in our approach. I think there's a lot of ways to do this.

Cameron Winklevoss: Again, you can spend a lot of time trying to destroy the football team or you can work with the headmaster to build the rowing team and once people start seeing, "Oh, there's that other opportunity over there" and in the case of women, there's tremendous amount of rowing programs in college. So there's all this opportunity for them to play a varsity sport throughout high school and college and it's always seemed like a more positive way to put your focus. So going back to the Napster days, you can try and sue everybody who's pirating music, or just create a better experience and solve it that way.

Peter McCormack: So do you think there's people who've got misconceptions about you two and Gemini then?

Cameron Winklevoss: 100%!

Peter McCormack: Well I think they have.

Tyler Winklevoss: And it's kind of not their fault, because you see this movie and movies are so powerful, they're so indelible. Even now, people remember movies more than sports performances. I watched Michael Jordan win a lot of his championships, but that doesn't resonate with me necessarily as much as a film or a quote from a film, like the Big Lebowski or something, those movies that people keep quoting. So film stars tend to reach a peak and sear themselves into your memory more so than anything else.

So yeah, like "The Social Network, okay, we figured out these guys" and then you see us in suits talking about regulation. But I think that the truth is we're just a lot more nuanced than a picture, or a movie, or a business page. So I guess the answer is people have got to download this podcast and listen to it to get to know us.

Peter McCormack: All right, so tell me a little bit about what's going on with the Wall Street people, because you want to engage with Wall Street. I'm actually making a one episode audio documentary that's coming out on Wednesday where I'm looking a little bit at Wall Street and looking a little bit what happened in 2008 and the lessons that weren't learned. Yet you guys still want to engage with Wall Street.

So what I'm trying to understand is one, why do you want to engage with them? I think it's probably because they've got loads of money and they can help accelerate what Bitcoin can do, which is great, but also, I'm trying to wonder, is there a new generation of Wall Street that you're trying to engage with? What's going on with Wall Street? Also what are the rejections you get from people?

Tyler Winklevoss: So I think the answer is, we're ready for Wall Street, we're not waiting for Wall Street. We have a mobile app this has been a retail driven market since day one for the last decade, basically and so we want to meet the customer in the market where it is, but also have the enterprise technology to handle when Wall Street actually comes in, because when they do, it'll be orders of magnitude bigger. So we want to be ready for Wall Street. Some of Wall Street has been here for many years, the market making shops, some of the more aggressive upstart hedge funds are there, a lot of the main line hedge funds aren't there yet, but the partners and the principals personally are and they've been putting their family office money in.

They can't justify putting their fund money into Bitcoin, but they can put their own money, which is considerable, into Bitcoin and so we've seen family offices, high frequency traders, and market makers be in Bitcoin and crypto for actually for a years, at least since 2017. But the large institutions are still not here. There's so much compliance, risks, questions and they've got these huge franchises and they don't want to jeopardize them. Then the asset allocators, which is the bigger, slower, more boring money, like pension plans and whatnot, they're very sophisticated on it, but they're still not there.

That's where an ETF helps because it makes it so easy for them to just buy a secure T-version of this through the normal distribution channels that they're already plugged into. So we're not waiting around for this, we're definitely ready! But we're speaking to the individual today. You can download the Gemini app, fire it up and start getting involved because that's what's really important. This movement's really about decentralization, right? Bitcoin is decentralization of gold, but Satoshi's white paper outlined the blueprint for the decentralization of anything and to me, decentralization is all about empowering you with greater independence and freedom so you can rely on yourself.

You don't have to, you can rely on other things, but if things got really bad, you at least have the option to rely on yourself. You have that choice. So a lot of people, even in America, can't get a bank account or limited bank account and so even in America, we think that is different country type thing. So that to me is the real promise of crypto, is greater choice, independence, opportunities for you, not for Wall Street. We didn't get into this to help Wall Street, I have nothing against Wall Street, I'm happy when they come. We'll be very thrilled when they come, it will be great for everyone. But this is really about you, the individual.

Peter McCormack: Anything on that Cameron?

Cameron Winklevoss: I think that was well said, yeah. I think that the market today, we've built for the market today, but we're also building for that future as Wall Street gets into the market more and you're starting to see a lot of people, Paul Tudor Jones, his macro outlook that came out a week or two ago was fascinating and probably the first of a number of people really coming around to Bitcoin and understanding that it is probably the best inflation hedge out there.

You're seeing people articulate, where they see the problems, but they haven't quite come to Bitcoin yet. But I think we think that they're important future customers. We look forward to that day when more of Wall Street comes into crypto. I think a lot of people, maybe this is a good segue into a lot of people looked at the price of Bitcoin in the selloff in March and were like, "Wait, what happened? Why didn't Bitcoin shine during that period of time?" And the truth is that... Well my belief is that first of all, everybody was running around with their hair on fire, trying to figure out, what is going on.

Peter McCormack: What the fuck is going on?

Cameron Winklevoss: Totally! The world coming to the end. Then what you do is you go into cash because you've got to cover margin and get liquidity to cover this or that and nobody has time or bandwidth to say at that moment in time, "Well gee, let's go into Bitcoin." They might be able to go into gold a little bit because they have that muscle memory and they can buy an equity pretty quickly, so they could buy a gold ETF or they can buy a futures. It's harder for a lot of these systems, asset managers and wealth allocators to come into Bitcoin because they're not so used to it.

We're trying to make it very easy with Gemini. We've got a qualified custodian where you can sign up very quickly and just start accessing it. But it just never happens that quickly, especially when the sky is falling. What we're going to see though, I believe over the coming months is that once the dust starts settling more and people take stock of what the hell has just happened and look at fiat regimes. The US is probably the best positioned, but that being said, it's in a very precarious situation, but it's probably in the best situation of all fiat regimes.

But people are going to take stock and I think that's when we start to see people have the bandwidth to explore Bitcoin and we've seen it anecdotally, a lot leading up and even in this fall, I think I saw a lot of people reaching out and sort of saying, "I get it now, I get the digital gold thesis." So we've been talking about digital gold for going on eight years right now. Our talking points haven't changed at all, but it takes time. They say in advertising you have to hear something seven times before you buy a product or whatever. Maybe with Bitcoin, you got to hear it 700 times, but once it clicks, people get it and it's really cool to see once people come into its system how passionate they become about it.

Peter McCormack: Well it's because people keep always having that conversation with Bitcoin about mass adoption and one of the things I was talking about somewhere recent, is that we have mass awareness. Everyone's heard of it now! I have a Bitcoin podcast, when people say, "What do you do?" I was like, "Oh I've got a Bitcoin podcast." Nobody says to me anymore, "What's Bitcoin?" They will ask, "Is it a good time to buy?" But the mass awareness is there, it is just that thing to get people to click, as it takes a long time.

I am wondering though, in the Wall Street stuff, because like I said, I'm making this a little audio documentary and I went through what happened in 2008 and I was like, "Well that was bullshit! Fuck Wall Street, fuck the bankers!" Then I've been looking at what's happening now and I've been kind of like, "Well fuck Wall Street, fuck big business and fuck the CEO's." Sorry, I'm swearing a lot!

Cameron Winklevoss: That's okay.

Peter McCormack: I do swear a lot, I curse a lot, but again, I'm just like, "How many times are we going to do this? How many times is this cycle going to repeat whereby the money system is essentially a casino for investors on Wall Street to make money?" And every time they screw it up, it's the little man who suffers, it's the small business, it's the hard working people who are queuing up at food banks.

I'm like, "How many times are we going to go through this?" And I do wonder, I've asked you about what happens when, how do we get a Wall Street into Bitcoin, but say flipping it the other way, when Bitcoin affects Wall Street, do you think that changes the game of Wall Street? Does Wall Street become a different beast?

Cameron Winklevoss: So Wall Street is such a broad term and that's one of the challenges. It's so easy to create this object out there, that's Wall Street, obviously there's a ton more nuance to it, but I think one of the problems with the Occupy Wall Street movement is it didn't really have an answer or a strategy forward. It's like, "We're just going to occupy and we're upset" and a lot of the people that were harassed or pillory, even anecdotally on the street were people in Wall Street that were in middle office or back office. Maybe you're the son of a fireman and you were making pretty good money, but working their asses off and weren't making the millions.

When you think of Wall Street and you think of the Hollywood, the American Psycho and Oliver Stone's Wall Street, a lot of people they're part of Wall Street, but they're not actually part of that part of it. I think that what's so amazing about Bitcoin is it actually is a blueprint for a strategy forward. But the more that I step back, the more I think we might actually all be on the same team in one way. I think most people on Wall Street are deeply, deeply concerned about what the hell has been going on with the printing of US dollars and so you could spend a lot of timing like, "Oh, it's us versus them."

Then you come around to this idea that actually, we in principle agree on most of the same things and when you really look at what's been going on the deficit spending in non-war time bull market that has been accumulating over and over again for the past decade, it's staggering and it's frightening and what the boomers are going to be leaving for the next generation to clean up is mind blowing! You look at college education, completely broken! There's no way most of these people can work their way out of those debts. But I don't think that a lot of people agree or believe in the college education system being broken or believe that education should be that expensive.

We're pretty much all on the same team, which is how do we go and solve it? So when I read Paul Tudor Jones' macro outlook, I was like, "We are speaking the same language! This is music to my ears and we're on the same team. Let's go and solve this thing! Let's go take Bitcoin, literally to the moon, where we create a check and balance on the system." People are like, "Okay, enough is enough and we're just not going to allow the government to distort and screw up our system so much."

Tyler Winklevoss: Wall Street is literally one street in New York, but most of Wall Street, when we think about it, it happens on servers in a parking lot in New Jersey. We don't have to fix that, we can just create a new one. Just like back to, we don't have to fix a football team, let's just go create the rowing team and some people from the softball team might join us. Some people from Wall Street might come join us, our CTO used to be the CTO of the New York Stock Exchange.

Our Chief Compliance Officer was Head of Global Financial Crimes at Morgan Stanley, they're joining us, and we're going to build this new frontier using crypto to reimagine the old world in our own new way. So I think that's the positive way to sort of look at it and when Wall Street comes along or people leave Wall Street to join us, that's great! Think about going out West and settling the West. I don't think it was worse when people picked up and started joining, and building up, getting the railroad tracks out there and the Sheriff's in town kind of building more saloons.

I don't think people who live out West now pine for the beginning days of the Wild West. So I think when like Wall Street comes and brings in capital and human capital and more people, I think it's only going to make things better the same way that new frontiers are great and exciting in the beginning, but you kind of want them to build up into mature things at some point.

Cameron Winklevoss: Just to add further to that point, a little bit is that I don't think anybody for the most part, the vast majority of people at Gemini and we're now pushing 260 people, are actually from crypto. Most people are coming from technology companies or finance or hedge funds or whatever and Gemini is their first foray into crypto. I kind of love the new world analogy of America.

People, they're sitting wherever they are in Europe and they're like, "GTFO, we're going to jump on a boat. We'll probably die on the journey over, but if we don't, we're going to settle in the new world, and maybe we'll die like within the first six months, but if not, it's still worth it. We're just going to go build this new country and this system." What makes America, America, is the system and the rules, it's the constitution. It's not the land. Obviously the people, but the rule set and it's a 250 year plus rule set and it's worked phenomenally well...

Tyler Winklevoss: But it's not just the rules, right? It's the culture, it's the dream and this philosophy, because the constitution is open source. You can just copy it and paste it into any country you want, but nobody does that, and it doesn't seem to work. So it's really the purpose that we all buy into. So let's start something new as opposed to trying to change the philosophy, culture, the stripes of the old I think.

Peter McCormack: I can give a good outside perspective on that because there's no country I've visited more times than America, I've been like 60, 70 times. I love going to all different parts of America, but recently I've been studying the constitution. So I saw Hamilton in New York and London and I was like, "Okay, London was better, we were kinder to the King." So I've been watching documentaries about Jefferson, about Washington, I've been trying to study the constitution and it's really fucking interesting. It does feel like you have this way, this cultural way of saying, "We can go and build something, we can do what we want and if we don't like the government, we can stand up to the government."

But I do also feel like one of the shames that I find at the moment, I don't think you have political leaders who are similar to the founding fathers. I think they're so far away from them and I think this is why we need Bitcoin because, we look at what's been going on in 2008 and especially what's going on now.

I look at someone like Steve Mnuchin, who was part of the architecture that created the 2008 crisis and then bought a bank to go steal houses off the people that he helped lose their jobs, and now he's Treasury Secretary and I think they're a long way from your founding fathers. So I like the way for that people stand up for the constitution, Americans do, because I think it's brilliant, I just feel it's a shame your politicians don't.

Cameron Winklevoss: The founding fathers, I think it's also important to note that there's a lot of disagreement in Hamilton and all the papers, the Federalist Papers, how to set up this new form of government and tons of disagreement and discourse. So I think when you look at Bitcoin and there's regulation, screw regulation, this or that, it's important to have disagreement. We're not going to agree on everything for sure and they were visionaries and revolutionaries, but this kind of goes back to our idea, the campaign that we ran last year, that the revolution needs rules.

Throwing over the king, the tea party, like in Boston or whatever, that's step one. But what makes America, America, is what they did after that and they went zero to one and they built the country, it's literally a start-up country! We built it and we know how that sort of played out. I think that one of the challenges is maybe to draw parallels to start-ups, when you lose the ability to take risks, and you're kind of just managing the franchise and not willing to disrupt yourself, then you run into problems and you rely too much on the...

Tyler Winklevoss: Microsoft is pretty a pretty awesome analogy. Microsoft, there's a period, it's getting back to... It lost its way for a good 10 or 15 years, and it's finding its way back. This self-quarantine feels Groundhog day, but the halvings feel like Groundhog day too, if you look at the Genesis block, the inscription and the Genesis box, and then the inscription in block, what is it? 639,000, are we in the same movie and it's 12 years later?

Peter McCormack: It's getting worse!

Tyler Winklevoss: It's getting worse and it's just perpetuating.

Peter McCormack: It's the Empire Strikes Back where everything's gone to shit!

Tyler Winklevoss: But Bitcoin is the answer. It's the only heads or vaccine to give you immunity to the disease of money printing. So this is going to come to a head, it can't go on forever and I actually tweeted, "What's the inscription of the next having in four years? Caption this." So we'll see, but it can't go on forever. So maybe as a country, we've lost your way at some point, but I think we can get it back.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, you still have a constitution and people still defend the constitution. It's still there, it's not like anyone's trying to change the constitution. Did I miss something then with this revolutions need rules? I'm quite a simple guy, so when I saw it, I was like, "What the fuck you on about man, this is a revolution. I don't want any rules."

But if you actually look back at what happened with the Declaration of Independence, that was in essence of revolution against us, the British, you kicked us out and through our tea, was it Boston Harbour? But actually there was a bunch of rules created. Am I missing something there? When I was like, "Revolutions need rules, that's not sexy." Were you harping back to such a situation as that?

Cameron Winklevoss: Yeah, we exactly were. If you look at some of the imagery, it hearkens back to, I think George Washington crossing the Delaware. There's sort of the revolutionary, but the founding fathers imagery...

Tyler Winklevoss: There's also oath on a tennis court, in the French Revolution where they sign the oath on the court tennis court.

Cameron Winklevoss: Right! So a lot of that, is informed by our early experience in Bitcoin and using Mt.Gox and I'm seeing it go down for 12 hours at a time and constant brownout. Back then the main news source in crypto was Reddit and if you just go through the Reddit forums, people are just super slaggy on Mt Gox and upset about it. So Mt Gox is sort of the classic example of that business would never be approved in New York to do business, it would have never passed muster.

So you've got to have some sort of safeguards in place, otherwise, it can get really ugly and people get hurt. That is sort of informed by our experience in the Wild West days and understanding that like, "Look, we've got to get some rules in here if this is going to go mainstream", otherwise it's just going to be this economy that is going to exist on the Magic The Gathering Exchange that pivoted, and that's not really exciting, or the prospects of that long-term are aren't too interesting.

Tyler Winklevoss: The message is also unclear, but at the same time it's clear. But I think it's more directed at the company's built on top of crypto and Bitcoin, as opposed to Bitcoin itself. Bitcoin has rules, it's embedded in the code. It needs rules and that's why people buy in to the system, the companies that are built on top of it, especially the ones that custody your money, need to be or should be thoughtfully regulated.

So there's a couple of different layers to the message and there's also a little ambiguity and that makes a great advertising campaign. If some people kind of get it or interpret it... It's sort of social network, you can come out of the theatre and argue all these points, and if someone takes a picture and it's a little bit pissed off and throws it up on Twitter, well thank you, it's working! So it's supposed to be a little bit thought provoking in a way and we don't expect everyone to agree with us. I'm not even sure we fully know what we need too, the constitution is something that does evolve, it's a rule base that evolves. It's all experimentation!

So even New York state, their rules may evolve and this is all one big experiment. I'm not going to say that we've all figured this out. I don't think Bitcoin core developers understand if they've figured it all out yet. The code that exists today is very different than the code that Satoshi published or launched into the world with the Genesis Block and I think his fingerprints are even hard to find or discern at this point. So the revolution needs rules, it means a lot of things and it can mean many things to many people. But like The Social Network, it gets the conversation started, and ultimately that's a good thing.

Peter McCormack: Well the "crypto needs rule" definitely got a lot of people talking, there's no doubt about that. I don't know who your agency is in New York, but it definitely got people talking. I hated it at the time, I think I was trolling you, I think I made my own banners up. I was like... I don't know, I can't remember. But kind of on reflection, I get it and look, Bitcoin has rules, it has consensus rules. It works because of those rules and you can't change those rules.

Also look, the other thing I get is that I think we need everyone, I think we need the full spectrum of people. I think we need the bad ass, hardcore, OG Bitcoiners, the anarcho-capitalist, crazy kind of like, "Fuck you, fuck the government", I think we need the whole spectrum to kind of morph Bitcoin into what it is and what it will be. I think if we were all on the same page, I don't think we would get the right kind of progression. Do you know what I mean?

Cameron Winklevoss: Totally agree!

Tyler Winklevoss: I think we need a melting pot.

Cameron Winklevoss: If you think of, we need to be a melting pot and I think different points of view is what makes crypto awesome and you don't have a ton of group think or everybody just sort of ratifying each other. But I think that there's the Gemini platform, I think it attracts folks who believe in sort of the opportunity, but also believe in the frontier and doing it in a way where there's some protection and we're trying to do it in a way that fosters trust, because there's so much distrust in the asset class, there's so many horror stories.

There's so many hackings, there's so many bad actors, there's so many people who are playing checkers when we really need to be playing chess, are thinking one move ahead, when we need to be thinking 10 moves ahead and that's the core group that we're really speaking to and appealing to. When you think of great companies like Apple that do protect your privacy, but also build great products and have done a good job on there, it's always sort of think different. It's not, "Let's go burn shit down" and you feel it with their products and you feel it with the company that they mean what they say, and they do what they say by and large.

With Gemini, if there's something that makes us different is that our goal is to earn and maintain trust. We're not going to tell you that we're the most trusted, it's not up for us to make that determination, it's up to you to make that determination. What we're going to do is do things that try and earn it and maintain it and we're going to speak to those individuals the same way someone who buys an Apple product, they're identifying with that movement, and with that ethos. There's some programmers and people that are going to want to use Linux.

They're more hardcore, they don't really care about the interface. They sit on a terminal and they just, whatever, it's just a piece of machinery or whatever. Then other people are going to buy a Dell because they really want to save the costs and that cost has been passed on to me and I'm thankful for that and I'm going for the Dell. So there's a spectrum and it all kind of fits into that personal computing revolution, this crypto revolution, there's the Gemini, part of that spectrum that we speak to and then there's a spectrum that's unregulated, offshore, anything goes, freewheeling that speaks to another customer. It's just not the game we're playing.

Tyler Winklevoss: And you mentioned that gap between, you now go around and what people ask you, what you do and you say, "Oh, Bitcoin." You utter the word Bitcoin, they've heard it, but they're not in and why is that? I think a company like Gemini can help bridge that gap and ultimately if we do that to some degree, then I think it's going to be great for crypto and the revenue.

Peter McCormack: Yeah! Well, listen, look, I'm conscious I've had a lot more of your time than I expected. Nearly two hours of yours, Cameron, a bit less of Tyler's, because he was late, but we'll forgive you! Now listen, I could probably do a five hour monster show if I really wanted to, this has been fascinating, but I know you're busy, so you probably want to get on with some things.

Let me go out with a final question for both of you, we'll go with you first, Tyler, and then finish up with you, Cameron. But realistically in your eyes, you've already made enough money, money isn't the issue for you guys. You said it before, you get to a certain point, it's boring. There's something else going on here. What is success to you, not only personally with Bitcoin, not how well does Gemini do, but what is success with Bitcoin? What do you think needs to happen for you to go, "Fuck, we really did it!"

Cameron Winklevoss: Well I think there's an obvious, simple sort of price framework. If Bitcoin's gold 2.0, then it's got to have a larger market cap than gold, but I think the deeper answer is can we make the current system better? We talked about all this money printing, it seems like Wall Street keeps failing and bringing everyone down, yet they always land on their feet time and time again and it's the same movie with an unhappy ending for the majority of the world, except for the few that keep trading the problems and also don't seem to be the victims.

They have this golden parachute all the time. So if we can create that alternative, that check and balance, if Bitcoin can be that, that makes everything better, that to me, is pretty significant meaningful success.

Tyler Winklevoss: So I would say, first of all, I agree with that and I believe that, so Bitcoin really created the blueprint of how to decentralize anything, and it created the entire genre and what I love to see in addition to Bitcoin really rivalling gold in market cap, is other decentralized projects start to challenge all of the centralized services that make up the web and web 2.0 today. So when people get upset at a social network and they're like, "Delete Facebook, I'm upset with how they're treating my privacy" And go where? You don't have another opportunity.

I think it would make Facebook better with more choice and it would really force a healthier ecosystem of options and it may turn out that the vast majority of people are totally fine with being on Facebook, great, but at least they have an option. We're not there yet, I think Web 3 is very young and new, but as we push down the road and have alternatives that are viable, that's when I think we start to say, "Okay, this is really changing the world and exciting."

Peter McCormack: Amazing! Well, listen, thank you so much for giving me so much of your time. Despite the long wait to try and get you on, I'm really glad how this turned out. This is the interview I wanted to hear with you guys, this was covering the stuff I wanted to hear, so I'm really glad I got to do it. I think people are going to love this! Hopefully at some point, we'll be able to get back on planes one day in the future, we'll get to do this in person again. But I wish you both the best of luck, and thank you so much.

Tyler Winklevoss: Thank you! Yeah, love the questions. This is definitely the interview I wanted to do. So the feeling's mutual and hopefully one day we can get together in person, share a beer, or as you might say it, share a pint!

Cameron Winklevoss: Yeah, really appreciate it and we'd love to come your way because we are opening in the UK and Europe, an office there and trying to get our license for that part of the world. So maybe we'll come to you.

Peter McCormack: Well, then I've got a great place to take it to dinner. Just let me know when you're in town!

Cameron Winklevoss: Perfect!

Tyler Winklevoss: Looking forward to it.

Peter McCormack: Appreciate it guys!

Cameron Winklevoss: Cheers!

Tyler Winklevoss: Cheers!